A village bakery that chose one biscuit.

Vermeiren is the brand of Vermeiren Princeps NV, a speculoos bakery in Bornem, in the Belgian province of Antwerp. Dutch Wikipedia’s article on speculaas lists it, as Vermeiren Princeps of Bornem, among four Belgian makers of the spiced biscuit, alongside Jules Destrooper, Lotus Bakeries and La Confiance. Dutch Wikipedia’s articles on Antwerp province and the Mechelen district list “traditional speculoos from Vermeiren of Puurs” among the region’s food specialities, which points back to the town where the bakery began. The name is not to be confused with the Vermeiren company that makes wheelchairs, which is a separate business.

The company tells its own early history this way. In the centre of Puurs, it says, Achilles Vermeiren ran a village bakery known for bread and for speculoos figures, and he found that the speculoos was what set the shop apart. In 1919 he decided to bake nothing but speculoos, for the travelling salesmen who carried the biscuits around the country. That year is the one the brand uses as its founding date: its website says it has made Belgian speculoos “since 1919,” and in 2019 it marked a hundred years with a new logo and an anniversary tin, according to a news item on its website archived that year. An older version of the company’s history page, saved by the Internet Archive in 2017, also says the family had been known as bakers since 1650; that claim rests on the company’s word alone.

The second date in the story is 1947. That year, the company says, Achilles and his sons Albert and Arthur moved to Hingene, in Bornem, and turned an old brewery into a speculoos bakery. A “who we are” page archived in 2015 says the limited company “was established in 1947,” so the business dates its trade to 1919 and its present company to the move. In 2008 its website was run in the name of Vermeiren Speculoos NV; by 2014 the footer read Vermeiren Princeps NV.

Ovens, ridges and new recipes.

The company credits Albert, the elder son, with building the first ovens at Bornem. Its 2017 history page says he built a semi-automatic oven by hand in 1948, and that at the end of the 1960s it was replaced by an automatic oven which Albert and Arthur adapted, because, the page says, traditional speculoos cannot be baked in an ordinary industrial oven. In the 1950s the bakery added whole-wheat speculoos; the company says the Dutch name for it, voltarwespeculoos, was coined by Achilles, and calls it a first.

Shape is the part of the product the company treats as its signature. Its current history says the “recognisable ridges and corners” remain Vermeiren’s trademark, and the 2017 page described two ridges and crooked angles and sides as what marks out a Vermeiren speculoos.

The later dates come from the same timeline. The company says a second baking line opened at the end of the 1980s and that in 1989 it baked its first speculoos with organic flour. It says it brought out sugar-free biscuits sweetened with maltitol in the mid-1990s, began making Fairtrade speculoos in 1997, and added the Max Havelaar label to its packs in 2005. Speculoos with almond pieces and with chocolate chunks followed in 2000, and individually wrapped biscuits for cafés and restaurants in 2006. In 2008 it launched a speculoos spread made from its biscuits, and in 2012 an organic version, which it describes as a world first. A third production line, it says, opened in 2020 because of demand for the spread, and a rum-and-raisin flavour arrived in 2025. The company also says it has always baked without preservatives, colourings or artificial flavourings.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all bake biscuits, and they come from two countries: Royal Dansk, Kjeldsens, Karen Volf and Bisca from Denmark, and Jules Destrooper, Dandoy and Vermeiren from Belgium. Biscuit brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from tins stacked high in a supermarket at Christmas to paper bags filled over the counter of a single shop, and a name that began in one town’s bakery can now be owned by a group based a long way from it.

A biscuit brand’s identity is usually carried by a recipe, a shape and a pack — a tin, a wrapper, a mould pressed into the dough — more than by any single product, and the name on the lid does not always tell you who owns it or where the oven is. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its biscuits are actually baked.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time and where its biscuits are made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name on a tin of speculoos.

Little about Vermeiren’s ownership is on the public record we could check. We found no report of a sale to a larger group, and the company’s website names no owner beyond the family story of Achilles and his sons. The 2015 page described a small firm of 25 employees running two fully automatic baking lines, and said half its biscuits were sold under the Vermeiren name and half under retailers’ own labels. The same archived pages give two different figures for its yearly output, so we leave the tonnage out. Its 2017 history page said all seven of its types of speculoos were made at the Bornem bakery.

Exports are part of how the company presents itself. Its archived news pages say it was nominated for the Export Lion, the annual prize that Flanders Investment & Trade gives to Flemish exporters, in 2013, and its current timeline lists nominations in 2011 and 2014, the latter its third. Its news pages have announced stands at trade fairs including ISM in Cologne and Foodex in Japan in 2018 and Anuga in 2021, and its website lists SIAL Paris in October 2026. Beside its packets of traditional speculoos and its spreads, the range includes speculoos for the Saint Nicholas season and gift tins made in the shape of small houses and of two cars, a Fiat 500 and a Volkswagen Beetle. For bakers and caterers it sells speculoos crumbs, powder, toppings and paste.

For a design guide, Vermeiren shows how a family bakery can build an identity on one biscuit, a founding date and the shape of its ridges. Compare Lotus Biscoff, another Belgian caramelised biscuit, and Delacre, a Brussels biscuit house. For this guide we use spice brown, caramel and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Vermeiren’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.